Tuesday, March 25, 2014

It’s a God Thing
is not, strictly speaking, an apologetics book. But I want to highlight it
because it mirrors an important point I’ve been making for a while. Before we
begin, though, some disclosure.

Charles Roesel, the author, is the father of my local ministry
partner, Carey Roesel. He is also pastor emeritus of First Baptist Leesburg
(FL), a prominent church in the mostly rural county to my west.But I’d write this review as I do even if
none of that were true. I’ve said a few times that if the church as a whole
were doing its job, we wouldn’t need things like Social Security, Medicare,
Medicaid, and Obamacare. FBC-L under Pastor Roesel was (and still is, under the new pastor) one of the few churches I
know of that is actually fulfilling its mission properly. It’s a God Thing is a
sort of manifesto for “ministry evangelism,” which is the phrase Roesel uses to
describe the mission.

How is that mission fulfilled? At FBC-L it is fulfilled with
a wide variety of ministries associated with the church. You’ll find everything
there from a ministry for homeless men to counseling to a thrift store to
services at nursing homes. The campus of FBC-L is filled with buildings
dedicated to ministry. One of these is a local motel that was purchased to
house the homeless.

In an age when so many of our churches are engaged in
frivolous pursuits like building swimming pools, this is a refreshing
difference. Roesel knows that the Gospel comes with responsibilities. Like me,
and like Carey, Charles Roesel sees that the church is losing members, and he
knows why: We’re not doing our job. To answer the obvious question: Yes, he
also thinks we need more in the way of apologetics as a ministry, too, though
in the book this would be under the rubric of discipleship and education (as I
agree it should be). He and I have talked in person, of course, so I know how
he feels about it.

At about 84 pages, this book is an easy read which you can
pick up to give you an idea how those responsibilities can be fulfilled. I wish
there were more pastors like Charles Roesel around – even though if there were
too many, I’d be out of a job!

Thursday, March 20, 2014

From the March 2011 E-Block.**I have little enough to say about A. W. Tozer,
reputedly a self-taught Bible teacher who has become a beloved
devotional author. I checked out these three titles:

Man: The Dwelling Place of God [MDP]

Root of the Righteous [RR]

The Pursuit of God [PG]

The mystery for me remains why authors like Tozer become popular,
though I use the word “mystery” facetiously. Tozer, like Spurgeon in
our last entry, is spiritual comfort food, but where Spurgeon was
macaroni and cheese, Tozer is a cup of hot (but thin) soup that can put
you to sleep if you’re not careful. I have no reports of Tozer misusing
Scripture – because in these books he only rarely quoted it, and never
performed anything that remotely resembled an exegesis.

Instead, Tozer
is simply one devotional exhortation after another – in which Scripture
may make an allusive appearance, if anything at all.

There is to be sure much good in Tozer. Among the more heartening emphases I found:

A sad but strong denunciation of the use of entertainment to fill churches.

A stress on obedience and devotion.

An excellent exposition on prayer as something done for the
same of communication, not to ask for stuff. At one point, the image is
used of Christ as “Aladdin’s Lamp” (as seen by those who think prayer is
for the latter purpose).

An early (and very accurate) assessment of deficiencies in “no lordship” salvation.

A discussion of the need to follow up evangelism with discipleship.

Calls for better discrimination.

Indications of discipleship as work (eg, “there is no short cut to sanctity”) and not merely fun.

These are all well and good. But there were also a number of
disturbing elements. In these, I perceive Tozer to have been innocent of
wrongdoing, but it is disheartening to think that his devotional
readers will take the following to heart:

“I believe that we find the Bible difficult because we try to read
it as we would any other book, and it is not the same as any other
book.” Tozer thinks this is because the Bible was “directed to a chosen
few” who would understand it, but there is no reason to think this,
given that, for example, even atheists can arrive at correct
understandings after study. The real cause for the difficulty is that
the Bible was written in a high-context society.

“Faith based upon reason is faith of a kind…but it is not the
character of Bible faith” which rather “asks no further proof than the
moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. “ This of course is an
incorrect definition of faith – one that says, “God said it, that
settles it”. Elsewhere Tozer proposes that the new reader of the Bible
would conclude that “faith is the gaze of a soul upon a saving God” and
“a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own
vision and getting God into focus.” He has captured to some extent the
loyalty aspect of faith, but not the full nature of its object (based on
evidence).

Several statements offer what amount to disturbing rejections
of apologetics: “To dig among rocks or to search under the sea for
evidence to support the Scriptures is to insult the One who wrote them.”
And: “God needs no defense” – from there, Tozer speaks of judging the
Word instead of letting the Word judge you. These are standard riposte
from those who reject apologetics or scholarship as an exercise. The
truth is there is no “insult” to God in seeking evidence; it rather
brings glory to Him. It is not so much that God “needs” defense but that
arguments against God need defeat.

There is the usual overemphasis on “relationship”, as in: “The
Bible assumes as a self-evident fact that men can know God with at least
the same degree of immediacy as they know any other person or thing
that comes within their field of experience.” (But does Tozer know that
in the Biblical world, people didn’t “know” each other with that much
intimacy?) And:
“We are turning out from the Bible schools of this country year after
year young men and women who know the theory of Spirit-filled life but
do not enjoy the experience. These go out into churches to create in
turn a generation of Christians who have never felt the power of the
Spirit and who know nothing personally about the inner fire.” I am
reminded here of the person who told me that apologetics was unnecessary
because all people lacked today was “joy” in God. But what is this
“experience” is merely manufactured? Does it not concern Tozer that
Mormons, for example, speak just as readily of “inner fire”?

Actually, it probably would not. In Tozer I would suspect we have
someone who would say that we just need to witness to those Mormons and
not bother with apologetics – never mind that apologetics is the only
way he would have known they needed to be witnessed to in the first
place. Tozer was an earnest and sincere Bible teacher who clearly cared
deeply for God and for his brothers and sisters in Christ, and had he
stuck to nothing other than devotional commentary, all would be well
with him. But like many popular teachers, he allowed his care to compel
him to overextend his authority now and then.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

From the March 2011 E-Block.***Harold Camping could qualify as a ghost of both
end times past and present – and is about to become recognized as a
failure in both eras. Well known for predicting an imminent end to the
world this coming May, Camping played this game before, in 1994 – and
lost. He didn’t learn his lesson? Yes, that is so; but there’s a good
reason why, as I found in reading both his 1994 and his latest book, Time Has an End [THE].

I’ll begin with a note about Camping apart from his eschatology. I
have never read or heard Camping before, except for a few static-filled
minutes on a radio during a California vacation 10 years ago . I knew
of him earlier when Edmund Cohen, a Skeptic, referred to him in his book
The Mind of the Bible Believer. In my review of that book I said:
Beyond that, he considers Harold Camping to be "the most
intellectually competent and honest Bible expositor" [370] he knows of
-- which, with due respect to Camping, frankly tells us little other
than that Cohen's scholarship level leaves much to be desired.

…Finally: "The believer prays more, turns Family Radio up louder
to drown out the doubts, goes to a church service to get peer
reassurance, reads the Bible to reinforce the allegorical suggestions of
separation of the realms, etc." [359]
In retrospect, I gave Camping far too much credit. After reading
these two books, Cohen’s comments take on a new light. I wouldn’t call
Camping a cult leader...yet. But he comes very close. Examples of some
of his stranger views include:

Using birth control is “re-writing God’s law” because it means
disobeying three passages in the Psalms (!) that praise fruitfulness,
and violates other passages like Is. 42:5 indicating that God creates
the baby in the womb. Those who use birth control fail to “trust that
God knows exactly what size every family ought to be.” [1994, 146-7]

Satan himself is the antichrist. [1994, 190]

Camping employs homiletics that are strange and imaginative by
any standard: For example, Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27 “typifies Satan’s
attack on the church.” [1994: 227] How? Example: “the ship was
destroyed even as the era of the New Testament church will end with the
final tribulation period.” Later [1994:446], the 2000 cubit space
between the ark and the people in Josh. 3:3-4 is taken to be a picture
of the 2000 years between Jesus’ lifetime and the modern age. This is
all strictly contrived and without any textual, historical, or
exegetical basis.

Oddly enough, though posed as eschatological manifestos, the bulk of
both of these books are not about eschatology. Most of them go towards
validating a complex yet contrived thesis of Camping’s that significant
events in the Bible are separated from significant eschatological events
in our future by spans that equal large, round numbers of years (2000,
3000) or otherwise are attended by certain significant numbers. The
“bulk” of these books -- and by this I mean size, not content – make for
an imposing presentation to those unfriendly with mathematics, as I am.
I am, however, more friendly with statistics, and from that
perspective, find that Camping makes too much of too little.

In the above referenced item on Paul’s shipwreck, for example,
Camping is impressed by the use of the number 276 as the number of
survivors of the ship wreck. 276 is designated as an “extra special
number” [1994:229]. Why?

Yes, I know: So what? Well, we are assured that the number 2
“signifies the body of believers,” 3 represents “the purpose of God,”
and 4 “universality,” and 12, “the fullness of whatever is in view in
the context.” Do they? No, not really. All Camping has done here is play
a familiar game. Here’s an example of how.
In some instances in the Bible, twelve does represent a fullness –
of Israel, because there were twelve tribes. And some Biblical
“twelves” (like the Apostles, or the cakes of Lev. 24:5) are derivative
of that same tribal accounting. But because they are all derivative from
that original “twelve” they really count as only one signifying
instance of the number, statistically speaking.

Other “twelves” have no bearing on this and do not represent
fullness in any sense. But in the examples Camping does give, he “force
fits” the description of an event into his theme for the number by
adding explanations until it fits. An example (not one he uses here)
would be taking the woman with the 12-year issue of blood (Luke 8:43) as
a fulfillment of the theme by saying the 12 represented her “fullness”
in being healed. Once this is seen, Camping’s mathematical
gerrymandering can be plainly seen for the statistical playground that
it is.

I mentioned earlier that there is a reason why Camping did not
learn from his 1994 error. The answer to this is that he had already set
it up in his 1994 book that 2011 would also be a significant
year. He had targeted it [1994:494] as being exactly 7000 years after
the Flood, so under his scheme that round, large numbers signify events,
it was already in his mind that 2011 would mean something. All he did was re-arrange the events attached to the years in question.

Thus it is that in THE, Camping now says that 1994 was the year
“Christ came a second time to begin the completion the evangelization of
His true people.” [xv] If that sounds familiar, it should: It’s
essentially the Jehovah’s Witnesses all over again, an “invisible”
coming contrived to controvert the error. (Camping is ready for another
shift if he also proves wrong this time: We’re told that if the world
does not end in 2011, “we surely will receive correction from the Bible”
– e.g., he’ll realign the pattern to suit the evidence again.)

As part of this adjustment, we are now told that we are presently
in the “Great Tribulation” – which will end in 2011; Satan is ruling in
many local church congregations, and “true believers” have been cast
out of them. It is not made quite clear who these “true believers” are,
but it doesn’t take a stretch to suppose that Camping counts himself
among them, and that those who follow his teachings are also included.

So is this “over the edge” into cultism? Some ministries think
so. I find it fairly close, but am less concerned with the term than
with the error and the results on May 22, 2011. I also frankly think
that apart from mathematics, Camping is not brilliant enough to be
leading a cult, or to understand why his exegetical routines are sheer
folly. But that does not lessen the danger or disappointment his
teachings cause, and they stand s yet another object lesson with respect
to why the church needs to better educate believers: If we do not, well
– the next Harold Camping might be in the next pew, ready to say the
end is coming in 2045.